As a school based SLP for over 25 years, I have witnessed this trend first hand. I work directly with lower performing students and frustratingly watch how their learning is impacted when they are handed a chromebook. This technology creates another barrier to their learning. For example, with the ease of tech, these children are given academic accommodations (i.e. typing rather than writing, speech to text, audio versions of texts and so on) without being provided adequate opportunities to fully develop those skills. While accommodations are important at times, technology has allowed these tools to be used excessively and I would argue reduces the opportunity for children to develop these skills. How can we truly measure the missed opportunities a child with dyslexia has to develop their reading skills when they always have the ability to listen to a story or math problem because it is presented on a screen? How can we accurately measure how giving a child with ADHD a device that is designed to rob their attention and expect them to learn to their fullest potential? How can we expect children with fine motor weaknesses to develop their skills when they are always allowed to type rather than write? Our current education system is so focused on gathering data through progress monitoring using a computer that children who are struggling learners will continue to fall further behind. Add AI to the mix and this gap will grow even wider.
Thank you for your comment, Denise. There are many ways digital tech might hurt struggling students the most - perhaps it is most distracting for those with low conscientiousness or executive functioning skills, who are more likely to struggle. It might make cheating easier, and if lower-performing students are more likely to cheat, they will be more affected by the change. Your comment suggests another possible mechanism: computers that imperfectly monitor progress and replace in-person monitoring might leave students who need the most help behind.
I have also seen this trend in the students I work with. I'd like to expand on your point about students with weak executive function. It's not just an issue with distraction. So many of the computer based learning programs and accommodations require *higher* levels of executive functioning than their paper and pencil counterparts. A few examples - Look at Google Classrooms, which is the assignment and class management program used by so many schools. It is a weak executive functioning nightmare that requires students to navigate and monitor multiple tabs and files, know where to look for assignments and materials hidden behind various file names and in different locations, and switch back and forth between them. It also requires a fair amount of computer literacy and savvy and even fine motor skills navigating different tools and uploading and downloading files. Students are also not trained on how to use speech-to-text effectively and how to edit and organize the outcome. It's just assumed the digital generation will figure it out. And students become very passive relying on word prediction and often don't have any strategies for what to do if what is offered isn't what they want. Students with dyslexia still struggle to read and edit what is offered to them through word prediction or what comes up on the screen in voice-to-text. Writing disabilities are not just about fine motor skills and the physical act of writing. They are also about thought organization and difficulties with composition and other issues with oral language and executive functioning that are NOT addressed through using a keyboard or voice-to-text. Finally, if people could actually sit down with students and see how much they just mindlessly click through answers and randomly try things until they get what the computer tells them is the right answer, they would understand just how little learning is actually happening in these digital lessons.
I agree! It is so hard for research to quantify and measure all the ways in which the learning process is degraded when a computer screen is used instead of traditional books and pencils. In addition, despite controls such as GoGaurdian, kids can access the internet and games that are specifically designed to hijack their attention. This happens to the majority of adults that use computers with a fully formed prefrontal cortex!
Jakey, exactly! Computers don't just imperfectly monitor progress, they also impede a child's ability to learn. Technology is always framed as helping students with learning challenges, which it can and has its place. However, when accommodations are used so frequently and with much younger learners, they often miss critical opportunities to practice and develop their skills away from screens. There is more digital curricula being designed to be used with kids at much younger ages in addition to all the progress monitoring being done on computers. Most all children are impacted but our struggling learners are impacted the most. It is very difficult to find any research that looks into this and it is so nuanced that it would be challenging to measure as well. Just sit next to a 10 year old with ADHD attempting to complete an iReady math assignment on their school issued chromebook, it will make you wonder why we ever did this to kids.
I think that only exceptional students succeed beyond expectations. Most students feel that if they have met expectations, they've gone as far as they need to go.
The first George Bush made reference to the "soft bigotry of lowered expectations."
Denise, thanks for your experienced comment. This is my intuition as a Black boomer female software engineer. Not in education, no children and truthfully the article is TLDR. Yet fully aware of ever evolving knowledge tools since involved in hardware/software evolution since the 1980s, seems logical that tools can accelerate top students potentially widening a "gap". And tools that alleviate friction eg "AI summaries instead of reading original source" can be detrimental for students who had not previously taken the time and effort to develop reading and writing comprehension.
So what does a parent with these kind of kids do?? I have a friend who is an academic physician with a child who is struggling and found to be dyslexic and ADHD.. she was recently telling me there is a new program for kids with dyslexia- is this one of the programs your talking about??
Encourage your friend to advocate for as much work as possible on paper and reading from books, not on the screen. Emily Cherkin as a ton of resources here https://thescreentimeconsultant.com/resources/unplug-edtech-toolkit The best programs I have seen for dyslexia are Orton Gillingham or Wilson, I don't believe they have a computer component. Good luck!
No one will say, write, or research about this: the declline began with the disapprearance of two-parent, one at home full-time, households + extreme technology inflicted on developing brains. Put another way, the abandonment of our children to strangers for the years when they are most vulnerable and biologically designed to be near their mothers. (I'm a moderate leftist, so this is not coming from a religious perspective.) That and the fact of public schools being funded by property tax creates the perfect storm.
Thanks for your comment! It would be interesting to see if the higher-lower gap widened for students in two-parent households, etc. We have seen that the gap has widened similarly across race/ethnicity, gender, and income.
My impression is that this topic gets researched and written about constantly. However, the scores presented in this article seem to have risen between 1990-2010, a period when two-parent households generally declined and an increasing share of moms worked, so it seems like a non sequitur here.
"Heterogeneous Effects of Closing the Digital Divide During COVID-19 on Student Engagement and Achievement" found the same effect of devices widening the achievement gap between the lowest and highest performers. https://edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1153 Without device restrictions, the devices end up producing endless distractions from learning. As you said, highly conscientious students have the ability to focus and leverage these tools to their educational advantage, but for those who don't have that ability, the devices end up being their Achilles heel. I view this effect as a failure of school IT administrators and parents to understand this and limit these devices to only function as tools. Now we know, and we need to do better. And no more excuses. It is 100% possible to limit these devices. I do it every day. I block every app/website except the educational one I expect my kids to be using.
Here is another factor to consider: In 2012 the Every Student Succeeds Act replaced No Child Left Behind. The intention was to provide a more holistic educational experience rather than the rigid "teach to the test" experience fostered by NCLB. This was a philosophical shift away from the notion of meritocracy. By prioritizing broader, less easily quantifiable goals over strict academic performance measures, this has paradoxically contributed to a degradation of actual learning and to the widening achievement gap.
It will be interesting to see data from the wider Anglosphere, although the societal trend of prioritizing social equity over meritocracy has also affected Australia and the UK.
As a school board member, I’m interested to know how the one-to-one chromebooks are affecting classroom instruction. Device use outside of school is definitely a concern, but not necessarily one we can control policy-wise. I know, for example, that my daughter’s 11th grade English and History classes had a combined humanities project where the students were given class time to work on it for weeks. I’m fairly certain in that scenario the more conscientious students actually used the class time to work on the project on their devices while the less conscientious students could appear busy on their chromebooks but probably just wasted time on websites or games.
Thank you for your hard work and meticulous documentation of a system that is failing too many students. I was a student in excellent public schools (ranked second in the state of Washington at that time) from 1957 until high school graduation in 1970, and then an excellent public university (University of Washington) for six years when I graduated with 3 degrees, cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa. One distinct advantage I had throughout my education was teachers who were highly qualified—women with limited opportunities and men from working class backgrounds who were the first in their families to have the opportunity to find white-collar jobs as a result of the GI Bill.
In 1976, I taught Art in a girls' prep school for 3 years and then English in a rural public school for the next forty. All this to say, I've been watching the evolution of public education for my entire life. I taught with very few teachers as capable as myself, several who treated teaching as an easy job (it's not easy if you are doing it well), and many who did not last as teachers. Another issue was the over-emphasis on college as a necessary step in every single child's future—where does that leave the teen without interest or capacity for college? But the other major factor affecting student learning that I witnessed was Common Core. "Teaching to the test" replaced innovation and adaptation to student interests with dull routine test-prep. Further, though I taught the use of computers in all my classes, I never allowed cell phones in my classroom, and the shift to on-screen learning has proven a disaster for human beings. I was in an early cadre of teachers approached and asked to participate in training for on-line education. It was horrendous in the way it valued rote response and failed to address either student needs or creative thinking.
I do think entertainment technologies are key here. I don't have the most recent Nielsen data, but television viewership has been much higher among African Americans, with Asian Americans the lowest. Similar trends are evident for social media, I believe (but should be checked). As other commenters note, giving family technology like computers, thought to correct the "digital gap" may actually make things worse because of what the technology is used for- generally entertainment, and not education, which likely impacts, lower income groups worse. Daily habits are key.
Thanks for your comment! You're right - Black and Hispanic teens spend significantly more time on social media than White teens, and are much more likely to be heavy users.
In my 60s I subbed in public and private schools. Whole Language reading was a big fail. Then they started using Singapore math. I tutored for more than 20 years, the only home with books were Russians and Jews. We are a dumb country and many in government are plain stupid and just want money put in their bank accou t.
Our district used whole language (which is why I taught mine reading with phonics myself at age 4), and the district used Everyday Math (also an epic fail and why I did a full year of math in the summer before each grade).
Much of educational achievement, even in a “good” school district comes down to parental involvement and the value families place on education. My parents, both teachers, learned with their first kid that no “system” of education will value your child’s education as much as the parents will value their learning/achievement. They taught us that lesson.
Of course you're correct. The problem I discovered is that there are more bad parents. When I was a psychologist one of my clients was a professional shoplifter. She told me it was a family profession. When I was subbing a four year old announced his parents went into people's houses when they weren't there. I've learned that too many people don't care about reading or any education for that matter.
This is a theory and im biased, but i assume when the educational system focuses on political activism, it is up to single undividuals to learn stuff themselves with extra effort, therefor inequality exacerbates
As someone who was in high school at the inflection point in this trend (2009-2013), I am pretty sure most of this was the phones. I didn’t have a smartphone until after I graduated and left for college, and I remember frequently logging onto facebook or IM after school and seeing lots of messages my friends had been exchanging all day…
Has it occurred to anyone that maybe it is time to use different metrics rather than math, reading and science for evaluating how kids are doing? What about the incredibly artistic child who just can’t do math the way it is taught and finds learning about science more interesting from YT documentaries than in a classroom? What if the books assigned are just not engaging compared to everything available at their fingertips on the World Wide Web? Of course phones have shattered the ability of kids to get an “education” by the standards of the pre-phone world. But for Life in the modern world maybe the issue is simply that being able to read, and do math and science just isn’t all that important to kids? Maybe the problem isn’t with the kids but with the way society does school?
Much of this was predicted in America's Perfect Storm a report authored by former ETS colleagues and treasured friends Irwin Kirsch, Henry Braun, Kentaro Yamamoto, and Andy Sum. So, we can't say we weren't warned even though 'screens' doubtless exacerbated the situation
Gentlefolk, thanks for this reporting. It's very important that educators and the public recognize that kids holding the shorter sticks are seeing their sticks get shorter and poopier (perhaps I'm torturing the metaphor there?). I am especially concerned about losses for students with disabilities.
I see the gap you describe as a variation of what Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman (and Stephen Stigler, Keith Stanovich, and others) described by various names, including the "Matthew Effect." As Stanovich explained in the case of learning the tool skill of reading, if students don't learn some fundamental skills (decoding) early, the knowledge gap that occurs between richly skilled learners and unskilled learners widens and widens subsequently.
Sadly, the dominant perspective in K-12 education (and teacher education programs) is less focused on directly teaching skills and competencies than on natural growth and development, discovery learning, constructivist theory, and etc. The explicit, systematic instruction that benefits low performers is anathema in schooling.
To be sure, the boom in use of technological devices is correlated with the increasing gaps in outcomes on large-scale measures. But, a lot of educators on policy makers understand that correlation does not...well, most of us can complete the phrase.
Also, the policy efforts to develop a shared set of goals for education—the "State Standards"—may look similar to an interrupt in a time-series study. However, (a) those standard were not a prescription for instruction and (b) there have not been any data (at least as far I've seen) to show what the outcome measures would look like were those policy changes not put in place (i.e., no experimental controls). One could plausibly argue that the changes in outcomes that American education has seen since the onset of the State Standards are simply a continuation of trends that were observed previously (or that some other variable co-occurring with the adoption of the standards is responsible for those trends).
Knowing that there is another metaphor at great risk of torture here, please allow me to say that those of us concerned about educational outcomes should be careful not to go, like a pack of hounds, leaping about and barking at the base of a couple of trees. We might miss that there is a forest all around us.
The shift to discovery learning has been disastrous. As an adult that attended a workshop of science discovery learning where they were “students” told me… she couldn’t figure out the point of the lesson and what was supposed to be learned! So how is a middle schooler supposed to?
I’m very interested in your point about the shift away from direct teaching. I’d like to see more research/data on this. I’m on a school board and “direct instruction” is almost a dirty word among the administration. The focus is almost entirely on engagement and we can keep the students engaged. And the conclusion has been the lowest performing groups, who also are the students of color, have to “see themselves” in the curriculum and in their teachers. Hiring goals are meant to match the race ratio of the teaching staff to the race ratio of the student population.
JJ, I'm sorry to hear about your experience. But I'm glad to hear that you are on a local education agency's board and that you are sensitive to the problem. In my admittedly subjective view, your experience is all too common. E. D. (Don) Hirsch documented the problem in his book, "The Schools We Need..." and Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann reported his experiences in a book entitled "Teaching Needy Kids in Our Backward System...." When they hear the names Engelmann and Hirsch, some—maybe many--school leaders (e.g., superintendents) will declare that they "know all about that stuff." You might find it entertaining to read those books and then have a conversation with your own LEA's leaders about the effectiveness of emphasizing engagement rather than demonstrated performance outcomes.
You are welcome to contact me outside this conversation. I am reluctant to divert the attention of the readers of Professors Rausch's and Haidt's (my former colleague--"Hi, Jon!") thoughtful commentaries by carrying on about my views.
Looking forward to hearing more on this subject of declining performace across the board of our failing education system. So may problems here in the states and world all solvable with the efforts from a system that would only give a shit. Could AI help by showing us what pre efforts don't work and what did work and then move foreward from there.
We have seen this in sports too. The fast are getting faster. The slow are -- well -- not showing up. Sorta like the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. But in sports, fitness, water safety such as swimming abilities, the top performers are really crushing it. The others are idle, absent, disengaged. Keeping up with the fast kids is a super-hard challenge. Plain old fun, recreation, sandlot play is becoming a distant memory.
As a school based SLP for over 25 years, I have witnessed this trend first hand. I work directly with lower performing students and frustratingly watch how their learning is impacted when they are handed a chromebook. This technology creates another barrier to their learning. For example, with the ease of tech, these children are given academic accommodations (i.e. typing rather than writing, speech to text, audio versions of texts and so on) without being provided adequate opportunities to fully develop those skills. While accommodations are important at times, technology has allowed these tools to be used excessively and I would argue reduces the opportunity for children to develop these skills. How can we truly measure the missed opportunities a child with dyslexia has to develop their reading skills when they always have the ability to listen to a story or math problem because it is presented on a screen? How can we accurately measure how giving a child with ADHD a device that is designed to rob their attention and expect them to learn to their fullest potential? How can we expect children with fine motor weaknesses to develop their skills when they are always allowed to type rather than write? Our current education system is so focused on gathering data through progress monitoring using a computer that children who are struggling learners will continue to fall further behind. Add AI to the mix and this gap will grow even wider.
Thank you for your comment, Denise. There are many ways digital tech might hurt struggling students the most - perhaps it is most distracting for those with low conscientiousness or executive functioning skills, who are more likely to struggle. It might make cheating easier, and if lower-performing students are more likely to cheat, they will be more affected by the change. Your comment suggests another possible mechanism: computers that imperfectly monitor progress and replace in-person monitoring might leave students who need the most help behind.
I have also seen this trend in the students I work with. I'd like to expand on your point about students with weak executive function. It's not just an issue with distraction. So many of the computer based learning programs and accommodations require *higher* levels of executive functioning than their paper and pencil counterparts. A few examples - Look at Google Classrooms, which is the assignment and class management program used by so many schools. It is a weak executive functioning nightmare that requires students to navigate and monitor multiple tabs and files, know where to look for assignments and materials hidden behind various file names and in different locations, and switch back and forth between them. It also requires a fair amount of computer literacy and savvy and even fine motor skills navigating different tools and uploading and downloading files. Students are also not trained on how to use speech-to-text effectively and how to edit and organize the outcome. It's just assumed the digital generation will figure it out. And students become very passive relying on word prediction and often don't have any strategies for what to do if what is offered isn't what they want. Students with dyslexia still struggle to read and edit what is offered to them through word prediction or what comes up on the screen in voice-to-text. Writing disabilities are not just about fine motor skills and the physical act of writing. They are also about thought organization and difficulties with composition and other issues with oral language and executive functioning that are NOT addressed through using a keyboard or voice-to-text. Finally, if people could actually sit down with students and see how much they just mindlessly click through answers and randomly try things until they get what the computer tells them is the right answer, they would understand just how little learning is actually happening in these digital lessons.
I agree! It is so hard for research to quantify and measure all the ways in which the learning process is degraded when a computer screen is used instead of traditional books and pencils. In addition, despite controls such as GoGaurdian, kids can access the internet and games that are specifically designed to hijack their attention. This happens to the majority of adults that use computers with a fully formed prefrontal cortex!
Jakey, exactly! Computers don't just imperfectly monitor progress, they also impede a child's ability to learn. Technology is always framed as helping students with learning challenges, which it can and has its place. However, when accommodations are used so frequently and with much younger learners, they often miss critical opportunities to practice and develop their skills away from screens. There is more digital curricula being designed to be used with kids at much younger ages in addition to all the progress monitoring being done on computers. Most all children are impacted but our struggling learners are impacted the most. It is very difficult to find any research that looks into this and it is so nuanced that it would be challenging to measure as well. Just sit next to a 10 year old with ADHD attempting to complete an iReady math assignment on their school issued chromebook, it will make you wonder why we ever did this to kids.
I think that only exceptional students succeed beyond expectations. Most students feel that if they have met expectations, they've gone as far as they need to go.
The first George Bush made reference to the "soft bigotry of lowered expectations."
Denise, thanks for your experienced comment. This is my intuition as a Black boomer female software engineer. Not in education, no children and truthfully the article is TLDR. Yet fully aware of ever evolving knowledge tools since involved in hardware/software evolution since the 1980s, seems logical that tools can accelerate top students potentially widening a "gap". And tools that alleviate friction eg "AI summaries instead of reading original source" can be detrimental for students who had not previously taken the time and effort to develop reading and writing comprehension.
So what does a parent with these kind of kids do?? I have a friend who is an academic physician with a child who is struggling and found to be dyslexic and ADHD.. she was recently telling me there is a new program for kids with dyslexia- is this one of the programs your talking about??
Encourage your friend to advocate for as much work as possible on paper and reading from books, not on the screen. Emily Cherkin as a ton of resources here https://thescreentimeconsultant.com/resources/unplug-edtech-toolkit The best programs I have seen for dyslexia are Orton Gillingham or Wilson, I don't believe they have a computer component. Good luck!
Thanks!!
No one will say, write, or research about this: the declline began with the disapprearance of two-parent, one at home full-time, households + extreme technology inflicted on developing brains. Put another way, the abandonment of our children to strangers for the years when they are most vulnerable and biologically designed to be near their mothers. (I'm a moderate leftist, so this is not coming from a religious perspective.) That and the fact of public schools being funded by property tax creates the perfect storm.
Thanks for your comment! It would be interesting to see if the higher-lower gap widened for students in two-parent households, etc. We have seen that the gap has widened similarly across race/ethnicity, gender, and income.
is there a way to get this incorporated in the next iteration or follow up? I'd be very curious to see any subsequent impact
My impression is that this topic gets researched and written about constantly. However, the scores presented in this article seem to have risen between 1990-2010, a period when two-parent households generally declined and an increasing share of moms worked, so it seems like a non sequitur here.
Actually, the % of children living at home with two parents is the highest it's been since 1991 :) via Tyler Cowen: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/07/usa-fact-of-the-day-15.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=usa-fact-of-the-day-15
"Heterogeneous Effects of Closing the Digital Divide During COVID-19 on Student Engagement and Achievement" found the same effect of devices widening the achievement gap between the lowest and highest performers. https://edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1153 Without device restrictions, the devices end up producing endless distractions from learning. As you said, highly conscientious students have the ability to focus and leverage these tools to their educational advantage, but for those who don't have that ability, the devices end up being their Achilles heel. I view this effect as a failure of school IT administrators and parents to understand this and limit these devices to only function as tools. Now we know, and we need to do better. And no more excuses. It is 100% possible to limit these devices. I do it every day. I block every app/website except the educational one I expect my kids to be using.
Here is another factor to consider: In 2012 the Every Student Succeeds Act replaced No Child Left Behind. The intention was to provide a more holistic educational experience rather than the rigid "teach to the test" experience fostered by NCLB. This was a philosophical shift away from the notion of meritocracy. By prioritizing broader, less easily quantifiable goals over strict academic performance measures, this has paradoxically contributed to a degradation of actual learning and to the widening achievement gap.
It will be interesting to see data from the wider Anglosphere, although the societal trend of prioritizing social equity over meritocracy has also affected Australia and the UK.
As a school board member, I’m interested to know how the one-to-one chromebooks are affecting classroom instruction. Device use outside of school is definitely a concern, but not necessarily one we can control policy-wise. I know, for example, that my daughter’s 11th grade English and History classes had a combined humanities project where the students were given class time to work on it for weeks. I’m fairly certain in that scenario the more conscientious students actually used the class time to work on the project on their devices while the less conscientious students could appear busy on their chromebooks but probably just wasted time on websites or games.
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/false-promise-of-device-based-ed
https://screenstrong.substack.com/p/the-learning-paradox-of-edtech-and
Thank you for your hard work and meticulous documentation of a system that is failing too many students. I was a student in excellent public schools (ranked second in the state of Washington at that time) from 1957 until high school graduation in 1970, and then an excellent public university (University of Washington) for six years when I graduated with 3 degrees, cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa. One distinct advantage I had throughout my education was teachers who were highly qualified—women with limited opportunities and men from working class backgrounds who were the first in their families to have the opportunity to find white-collar jobs as a result of the GI Bill.
In 1976, I taught Art in a girls' prep school for 3 years and then English in a rural public school for the next forty. All this to say, I've been watching the evolution of public education for my entire life. I taught with very few teachers as capable as myself, several who treated teaching as an easy job (it's not easy if you are doing it well), and many who did not last as teachers. Another issue was the over-emphasis on college as a necessary step in every single child's future—where does that leave the teen without interest or capacity for college? But the other major factor affecting student learning that I witnessed was Common Core. "Teaching to the test" replaced innovation and adaptation to student interests with dull routine test-prep. Further, though I taught the use of computers in all my classes, I never allowed cell phones in my classroom, and the shift to on-screen learning has proven a disaster for human beings. I was in an early cadre of teachers approached and asked to participate in training for on-line education. It was horrendous in the way it valued rote response and failed to address either student needs or creative thinking.
I don't post on substack but I have a blog janpriddyoregon
I do think entertainment technologies are key here. I don't have the most recent Nielsen data, but television viewership has been much higher among African Americans, with Asian Americans the lowest. Similar trends are evident for social media, I believe (but should be checked). As other commenters note, giving family technology like computers, thought to correct the "digital gap" may actually make things worse because of what the technology is used for- generally entertainment, and not education, which likely impacts, lower income groups worse. Daily habits are key.
Thanks for your comment! You're right - Black and Hispanic teens spend significantly more time on social media than White teens, and are much more likely to be heavy users.
https://www.generationtechblog.com/p/social-media-has-stolen-the-leisure
In my 60s I subbed in public and private schools. Whole Language reading was a big fail. Then they started using Singapore math. I tutored for more than 20 years, the only home with books were Russians and Jews. We are a dumb country and many in government are plain stupid and just want money put in their bank accou t.
Our district used whole language (which is why I taught mine reading with phonics myself at age 4), and the district used Everyday Math (also an epic fail and why I did a full year of math in the summer before each grade).
Much of educational achievement, even in a “good” school district comes down to parental involvement and the value families place on education. My parents, both teachers, learned with their first kid that no “system” of education will value your child’s education as much as the parents will value their learning/achievement. They taught us that lesson.
Of course you're correct. The problem I discovered is that there are more bad parents. When I was a psychologist one of my clients was a professional shoplifter. She told me it was a family profession. When I was subbing a four year old announced his parents went into people's houses when they weren't there. I've learned that too many people don't care about reading or any education for that matter.
This is a theory and im biased, but i assume when the educational system focuses on political activism, it is up to single undividuals to learn stuff themselves with extra effort, therefor inequality exacerbates
As someone who was in high school at the inflection point in this trend (2009-2013), I am pretty sure most of this was the phones. I didn’t have a smartphone until after I graduated and left for college, and I remember frequently logging onto facebook or IM after school and seeing lots of messages my friends had been exchanging all day…
Has it occurred to anyone that maybe it is time to use different metrics rather than math, reading and science for evaluating how kids are doing? What about the incredibly artistic child who just can’t do math the way it is taught and finds learning about science more interesting from YT documentaries than in a classroom? What if the books assigned are just not engaging compared to everything available at their fingertips on the World Wide Web? Of course phones have shattered the ability of kids to get an “education” by the standards of the pre-phone world. But for Life in the modern world maybe the issue is simply that being able to read, and do math and science just isn’t all that important to kids? Maybe the problem isn’t with the kids but with the way society does school?
Much of this was predicted in America's Perfect Storm a report authored by former ETS colleagues and treasured friends Irwin Kirsch, Henry Braun, Kentaro Yamamoto, and Andy Sum. So, we can't say we weren't warned even though 'screens' doubtless exacerbated the situation
Gentlefolk, thanks for this reporting. It's very important that educators and the public recognize that kids holding the shorter sticks are seeing their sticks get shorter and poopier (perhaps I'm torturing the metaphor there?). I am especially concerned about losses for students with disabilities.
I see the gap you describe as a variation of what Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman (and Stephen Stigler, Keith Stanovich, and others) described by various names, including the "Matthew Effect." As Stanovich explained in the case of learning the tool skill of reading, if students don't learn some fundamental skills (decoding) early, the knowledge gap that occurs between richly skilled learners and unskilled learners widens and widens subsequently.
Sadly, the dominant perspective in K-12 education (and teacher education programs) is less focused on directly teaching skills and competencies than on natural growth and development, discovery learning, constructivist theory, and etc. The explicit, systematic instruction that benefits low performers is anathema in schooling.
To be sure, the boom in use of technological devices is correlated with the increasing gaps in outcomes on large-scale measures. But, a lot of educators on policy makers understand that correlation does not...well, most of us can complete the phrase.
Also, the policy efforts to develop a shared set of goals for education—the "State Standards"—may look similar to an interrupt in a time-series study. However, (a) those standard were not a prescription for instruction and (b) there have not been any data (at least as far I've seen) to show what the outcome measures would look like were those policy changes not put in place (i.e., no experimental controls). One could plausibly argue that the changes in outcomes that American education has seen since the onset of the State Standards are simply a continuation of trends that were observed previously (or that some other variable co-occurring with the adoption of the standards is responsible for those trends).
Knowing that there is another metaphor at great risk of torture here, please allow me to say that those of us concerned about educational outcomes should be careful not to go, like a pack of hounds, leaping about and barking at the base of a couple of trees. We might miss that there is a forest all around us.
The shift to discovery learning has been disastrous. As an adult that attended a workshop of science discovery learning where they were “students” told me… she couldn’t figure out the point of the lesson and what was supposed to be learned! So how is a middle schooler supposed to?
Oh dear. Well, maybe that adult "student" can just wait a while and later she'll be ready to discover...errr, learn?
Hah. Highly educated lawyer was that “adult student”. Just a disaster for students when discovery learning is used over direct instruction.
Hawkeye, if you're talking to me, you're...well...uhm..."teaching to the choir."
I’m very interested in your point about the shift away from direct teaching. I’d like to see more research/data on this. I’m on a school board and “direct instruction” is almost a dirty word among the administration. The focus is almost entirely on engagement and we can keep the students engaged. And the conclusion has been the lowest performing groups, who also are the students of color, have to “see themselves” in the curriculum and in their teachers. Hiring goals are meant to match the race ratio of the teaching staff to the race ratio of the student population.
JJ, I'm sorry to hear about your experience. But I'm glad to hear that you are on a local education agency's board and that you are sensitive to the problem. In my admittedly subjective view, your experience is all too common. E. D. (Don) Hirsch documented the problem in his book, "The Schools We Need..." and Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann reported his experiences in a book entitled "Teaching Needy Kids in Our Backward System...." When they hear the names Engelmann and Hirsch, some—maybe many--school leaders (e.g., superintendents) will declare that they "know all about that stuff." You might find it entertaining to read those books and then have a conversation with your own LEA's leaders about the effectiveness of emphasizing engagement rather than demonstrated performance outcomes.
You are welcome to contact me outside this conversation. I am reluctant to divert the attention of the readers of Professors Rausch's and Haidt's (my former colleague--"Hi, Jon!") thoughtful commentaries by carrying on about my views.
Looking forward to hearing more on this subject of declining performace across the board of our failing education system. So may problems here in the states and world all solvable with the efforts from a system that would only give a shit. Could AI help by showing us what pre efforts don't work and what did work and then move foreward from there.
We have seen this in sports too. The fast are getting faster. The slow are -- well -- not showing up. Sorta like the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. But in sports, fitness, water safety such as swimming abilities, the top performers are really crushing it. The others are idle, absent, disengaged. Keeping up with the fast kids is a super-hard challenge. Plain old fun, recreation, sandlot play is becoming a distant memory.
I would take a look at ELL. Our school district budget for English Language learners has exploded since the mid 2010’s.
If you can’t read/speak/understand the language of the test and instruction, you are definitely going to drag the bottom 10-25 percentiles down.